Hidden victims: Crime ripples through neighborhoods
- pottstownmercury
- Mar 9, 2015
- 3 min read
Fear of gunshots affects families, especially children
By Evan Brandt
POTTSTOWN >> There are hidden victims of crime, victims who don’t show up in statistics and charts.
Angela Kearney’s 4-year-old granddaughter is one of them.
Kearney’s granddaughter lives in Pottstown’s First Ward, near enough to the shootings that occurred at Thanksgiving and again on Feb. 11 to hear the shots and the police response.
When the Thanksgiving shootings occurred, the 4-year-old “looked out the window and saw the police cars and the lights, and now she is afraid of the police, because she associates them with guns and being scared,” Kearney said of her granddaughter.
During the Feb. 11 shootings, “they heard the shots and everyone got on the floor,” Kearney said of her daughter’s family, whose identity is being withheld to protect their identity.
“Her behavior has changed,” Kearney said of her granddaughter. “She has started wetting the bed again and she’s been potty trained since she was 2.”
Kearney also has a grandson, 2, who “runs through the house screaming ‘the police are coming’ whenever he hears sirens,” she said.
In addition to her fears for their fears, Kearney is also worried about the long-term impact of this trauma.
“My mother was a nurse and she always said make sure kids have a solid foundation in those first seven years because what happens then plays out through the rest of their life,” said Kearney.
The impact can be more than just psychological and emotional. It may even cause illnesses later in life, according to recent studies.
According to an August, 2014 report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “physiologic effects of chronic stress in early childhood can include inflammation and altered immune function: these may contribute to depression, anxiety, cancer, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease later in life.”
Constant levels of chronic stress are sometimes called “toxic stress,” and scientists are just beginning to understand the long-term effects.
According to a 2012 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics, “the potential consequences of toxic stress in early childhood for the pathogenesis of adult disease are considerable. At the behavioral level, there is extensive evidence of a strong link between early adversity and a wide range of health-threatening behaviors.”
“At the biological level, there is growing documentation of the extent to which both the cumulative burden of stress over time (eg, from chronic maltreatment) and the timing of specific environmental insults during sensitive developmental periods (eg, from first trimester rubella or prenatal alcohol exposure) can create structural and functional disruptions that lead to a wide range of physical and mental illnesses later in adult life,” the report noted.
Chronic stress would be one word “Gloria” might use to describe her current situation.
Her situation has to do with an unruly and possibly criminal neighbor with whom her family’s twin home shares a wall.
(Because her problems are with her neighbor, The Mercury has agreed to change Gloria’s name to protect her identity.)
Gloria regularly finds small drug baggies and other evidence of drug use on the sidewalk in front of her neighbor’s home.
“I call the police, but they say they can’t do anything because they can’t prove it belongs to the people inside,” she said.
“The law works for the bad guys,” she said. “The law makes ten times more work for the police than for the bad guys.”
In addition to the paraphernalia, there are frequent disturbances, shouting and the sounds of violence from next door at all times of the day and night.
Her 7-year-old daughter, “won’t sleep alone in her room anymore. Every night she’s too scared and comes to my bed.”
Gloria recently installed cameras “which I can’t afford,” to try to satisfy the police’s requirements for evidence “but so far nothing has been caught on camera. It’s just so frustrating,” Gloria said, her voice trembling.
“I don’t want to go on living like this.”
